The brief
Solara Stay operates in four Spanish cities. Their SEO programme had treated the brand homepage as the destination for every mention. Global “boutique hotels Europe” lists linked to the root. Spanish city queries — a weekend in Valencia, a family stay near a specific barrio — still sent people to OTAs and to official tourism boards.
The Spanish city pages existed. They were thin, then they were rewritten. Links had not followed the rewrite. You cannot rank a city URL with citations that all point at the corporate root. Search systems are not that generous.
Seasonality is real. A six-month window had to include a shoulder season so we were not reading July noise as a method.
What we did
Each city became its own mini-brief: URL, local queries, local desks. National Spanish travel titles were used where the piece was genuinely about that city, not about the brand. Local magazines and newspapers did more of the useful work than the national lists.
Pitches offered reporting: a neighbourhood walking note, a shoulder-season calendar, a family logistics paragraph an editor could keep. We did not ask anyone to rank Solara against competitors in a table. We asked them to mention a stay where a stay belonged in the sentence.
Anchors were city language, not slogan language. Homepage links were allowed twice when a piece was genuinely a group profile. Everything else targeted the city URL. That discipline is visible in the placement chart.
Metrics were logged. A national title with a high DR and a thin city section lost to a local magazine with a real archive. The local magazine is what a person searching that city already reads.
Sessions across the engagement
Apr–Sep 2025. Organic is the destination URLs in this brief; referrals are clicks from accepted placements.
Organic sessions Referral sessions
What actually went live
Accepted URLs only. Declined prospects are not dressed up as a pipeline.
- City magazines / papers18
- National travel desks8
- Reported mentions5
What moved
Combined organic sessions on the four city pages rose 45 percent. Direct brand traffic was already strong from loyalty; it was not the object. OTA leakage on a few brand+city queries narrowed slightly. We will not over-claim last-click credit for a hotel stay.
Twenty-nine city-desk placements. Two homepage-only links, on purpose. Rankings on destination queries improved where the page deserved to compete with the tourism board and did not where the page was still thinner than the official guide. That gap is an on-site job.
Solara’s content team now writes the city page before we pitch the city. The previous habit — pitch first, page later — is how you end up with mentions of a URL that still says lorem.
Hotel search is infested with OTAs. We did not promise to unseat them. We promised that the city URL would look like a page a Spanish magazine might cite when it already writes about that barrio. That is a different job from “rank number one for hotel Valencia.” The ranking table in this write-up is the set of queries where a brand page can still be a source: neighbourhood, family logistics, a specific beach. Head terms remain an OTA sport.
Shoulder season in the chart is not a dip to apologise for. August is loud; September tells you whether the mentions were attached to demand that persists. We would rather show that shape than draw a straight line through the summer and call it a method.
Selected queries
Positions from the market named in the brief. A dash means the URL was not ranking in the top 100 at the start.
| Query | Before | After | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| hoteles barrio valencia | #16 | #7 | +9 |
| dónde dormir sevilla familias | #22 | #9 | +13 |
| hoteles bilbao centro | #18 | #8 | +10 |
| malaga hotel cerca playa | #25 | #11 | +14 |
What we declined
- Global hotel round-ups pointing at the homepage.
- English travel blogs as a language proxy.
- Paid “featured stay” modules in a sidebar.
A fifth city opens next year. The campaign for it will not start until the Spanish URL is a page a magazine would recognise.
Brand homepage mentions feel efficient. They are efficient at ranking the wrong URL. Solara’s placement chart is almost all city pages because that is where the queries live. If a future campaign ever needs a group profile, it can have one. It should not become the default destination again just because it is easier to paste.
The four city bars in the traffic chart are the commercial object. Brand-root sessions were already strong from loyalty and are not used as a success metric here.
Written 20 September 2025. Figures are from the campaign reporting for Solara Stay.